Because most environmental problems result from human intervention in the ecosystem, ecological research in the social sciences is now joining research in the biological and physical sciences as a means of addressing long-range problems. Within this type of social science research, no problem is more important than the investigation of disasters. To assess the impact of sudden cataclysms on the living conditions of families or communities, scientists need a set of pretested, standardized measures that can be used cross-culturally. Once a disaster strikes, investigators are often faced with insufficient tools for assessing its impact and evaluating whether aid programs have enabled households to recover or improve their conditions. In this book, the authors introduce and describe a measure - the Domestic Assets Scale - that they have developed to deal with these research problems. They first present theoretical arguments that relate living conditions to the concepts of disaster and development, they then show how the measure was constructed with the use of data collected in sample communities in Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, the United States, and Yugoslavia. Throughout their discussions, they emphasize the practical application of their theoretical arguments and address the research problems and constraints faced by investigators using this procedure. Finally, they assess the validity and reliability of the Domestic Assets Scale and show how it can be used to measure long-term change, especially in the wake of catastrophic events.

A pioneer in landscape studies takes us on a tour of landscapes past and present to show how our surroundings reflect our culture. "No one who cares deeply about landscape issues can overlook the scores of brilliant insights and challenges to the mind, eye and conscience contained in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. It is a book to be deeply cherished and to be read and pondered many times."-Wilbur Zelinsky, Landscape "While it is fashionable to speak of man as alienated from his environment, Mr. Jackson shows us all the ties that bind us to it, consciously or unconsciously. He teaches us to speak intelligently-rather than polemically or wistfully-of the sense of place."-Anatole Broyard, New York Times "This book is a vital and seminal text: do beg, borrow or buy it."-Robert Holden, Landscape Design (London) "Incisive and overpoweringly influential. It will probably tell you something about how you live that you've never thought about."-Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer "No one can come close to Jackson in his unique combination of historical scholarship and field experience, in his deep knowledge of European high culture as well as of American trailer parks, in his archivist's nose for the unusual fact and his philosopher's mind for the trenchant, surprising question."-Yi-Fu Tuan

Diploma Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject Biology - Ecology, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Rostock (Institute for Botany), 120 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Since the end of the 19th century, overall per-capita mobility of humans has increased significantly, leading to increased rates in human-mediated transportation of animal and plant species. The rapid spread of alien organisms, however, may lead to quick and unpredictable changes in ecosystems. Senecio inaequidens DC. (Asteraceae) is an invasive alien plant from South Africa that was first introduced to Europe 100 years ago and is characterized by an exceptionally fast rate of spread; it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids that are toxic to invertebrates, livestock and humans. In the study presented here, laboratory, greenhouse and field experiments on the biology of Senecio inaequidens were conducted, in order to find out if and how herbivory and plant competition influence growth, survival and reproduction of this plant. Specifically, the presence of vertebrate herbivores, molluscs, insects and plant competitors was experimentally manipulated using full factorial and split-plot designs. All experiments were performed at Imperial College, Silwood Park, about 30 km west of London (UK). Growth and fecundity of Senecio inaequidens were significantly affected by interspecific competition. Vertebrate herbivory only had a significant effect when a closed vegetation cover was present. On artificially disturbed plots, Senecio inaequidens showed high capability to overcompensate for herbivory. Mollusc herbivory significantly reduced fecundity of S. inaequidens. Different ecotypes of Senecio inaequidens showed different amounts of herbivore damage. One of the most remarkable results of this study was that Longitarsus jacobaeae, a native specialist leaf beetle, freely colonized Senecio inaequidens, indicating that native herbivores might be suitable biocontrol agents of invasive alien pla

Ever since the advent of "earth-based spiritualities" in our time, the call to realize the Divine Immanence, to see God in the forms of the natural world and the particular events of our lives, has become paramount. And yet, without a corresponding sense of the Divine Transcendence, we find ourselves drawn towards a kind of glamourized materialism, worshipping visible realities at the expense of the Invisible, taking as our deity a physical planet with a beginning and an end in time, instead of the living and eternal God, Who is before all beginnings and beyond all ends. This bias toward the Immanent as against the Transcendent (leading to the loss of both of them) has cast a shadow on the traditional religions, especially the Abrahamic ones: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has hidden from us the dimensions of those religions wherein it is explicitly stated that "the heavens declare the Glory of God and the earth shows forth His handiwork." In this book, the author attempts to right this balance by showing the place of the contemplation of the natural world, and a respect for the Earth, in all the traditional religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Native American spiritualities. Even the Lakota understand that this "Mother Earth" is not the absolute Reality, that behind her stands "Grandmother Earth," and behind her, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery itself. To mistake the Earth for God is to place a burden upon her that she is unable to bear, to deplete her resources and ultimately jeopardize her survival. But if we can regain the ability to contemplate God as He is in Himself, then this living Earth, and the material universe around us, will take their proper place in this contemplative act. They will be revealed as God's icon, the ensemble of His placeless and eternal signs manifesting in space and time, appearing through the only medium capable of bringing God and His universe together into perfect union: the human form. Charles Upton is a serious thinker from whom I have learned much. His writing merits close attention. Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

Why are we caught up in a spiral of ever-increasing violence and environmental destruction while simultaneously calling ourselves rational and intelligent? Can religion, science, capitalism, psychology, politics and education help us to change our behaviour, or is our destructive behaviour in fact deeply entrenched in these very institutions? How free and democratic are we really, in South Africa and in the rest of the world? Why did Jesus say, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”? What does it mean to become like a child? In From intellect to intelligence, the author combines his wealth of experience and insight with the wisdom of many others to penetrate into the heart of the crisis of humanity and planet earth. He critically explores and questions the very foundations of Western civilization and its interaction with Africa and the rest of the world, demonstrating how ‘wisdom of the most conventional kind’ has often created nothing less than a highly dysfunctional society. A society in which many of us may be very clever, but few act with intelligence. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “An increase in man’s spiritual potentiality is now the only change in the biosphere against the biosphere being destroyed. ”Using these words as his theme, the author points out that our spiritual potentiality has nothing to do with religion, but is ultimately our capacity to be fully and openly human: our crisis is essentially the loss of our common humanity. There is another way, and it is deceptively simple: a return to natural intelligence. This happens spontaneously when we integrate the head with the heart: when we are natural instead of normal. We can learn much from indigenous cultures, including African cultures, but only if Africa reclaims its own spiritual heritage.

Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global.Aletta Biersack's introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field's strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based "ethnographies of nature" keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization. Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Soren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gisli Palsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk

How Nature Speaks illustrates the convergence of complexity theory in the biophysical and social sciences and the implications of the science of complexity for environmental politics and practice. This collection of essays focuses on uncertainty, surprise, and positionality-situated rather than absolute knowledge-in studies of nature by people embedded within the very thing they purport to study from the outside. The contributors address the complicated relationship between scientists and nature as part of a broader reassessment of how we conceive of ourselves, knowledge, and the world that we both inhabit and shape.Exploring ways of conceiving the complexity and multiplicity of humans' many interactive relationships with the environment, the contributors provide in-depth case studies of the interweaving of culture and nature in socio-historical processes. The case studies focus on the origin of environmental movements, the politicization of environmental issues in city politics, the development of a local energy production system, and the convergence of forest management practices toward a dominant scheme. They are supported by explorations of big-picture issues: recurring themes in studies of social and environmental dynamics, the difficulties of deliberative democracy, and the potential gains for socio-ecological research offered by developmental systems theory and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of intentionality. How Nature Speaks includes a helpful primer, "On Thinking Dynamically about the Human Ecological Condition," which explains the basic principles of complexity and nonlinear thinking. Contributors. Chuck Dyke, Yrjoe Haila, Ari Jokinen, Ville Lahde, Markus Laine, Iordanis Marcoulatos, John O'Neill, Susan Oyama, Taru Peltola, Lasse Peltonen, John Shotter, Peter Taylor

Stopping Oil dives into the story of how deep-sea oil exploration became politicised in Aotearoa New Zealand, how community groups mobilised against it and the backlash that followed. It is also a story of activists exercising an ethic of care and responsibility, and how that solidarity was masked and silenced by the neoliberal state. As Aotearoa New Zealand began to pursue deep-sea oil as part of its development agenda, a powerful climate justice campaign emerged, comprising of a range of autonomous 'Oil Free' groups around the country, NGOs like Greenpeace, and iwi and hapu (Maori tribal groups). As their influence increased, the state employed different tactics to silence them, starting with media representations designed to delegitimise, followed by securitisation and surveillance that controlled their activities, and finally targeted state-sanctioned violence and dehumanisation. By highlighting geographies of hope for radical progressive change, the authors focus on the many examples of the campaign where solidarity and political responsibility shone through the repression, leading us towards a brighter future for climate justice across the globe.

Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes hitchhike to Hawaii in the landing gear of airliners; pernicious European zebra mussels, riding in ships' ballast water, disrupt aquatic ecosystems across the United States; feral camels and poisonous foreign toads plague Australia; giant Indonesian pythons lurk beneath homes in suburban Miami. As alien species jump from place to place and increasingly crowd native and endangered species out of existence, biologists speak fearfully of "the homogenization of the world." Never mind bulldozers and pesticides: the fastestgrowing threat to biological diversity may be nature itself.
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"Out of Eden "is a dazzling personal journey through this strange and shifting landscape. Alan Burdick tours the front lines of ecological invasion in the company of world-class scientists: in Hawaii, Tasmania, Guam, San Francisco; in lush rain forests, aboard an Alaska-bound oil tanker, inside a spacecraft-assembly facility at NASA. Wry and reflective, animated and provocative, "Out of ""Eden """is a search both for scientific answers and for ecological authenticity, from a writer of remarkable range and talent.

The suburban lawn sprouts a crop of contradictory myths. To some, it's a green oasis; to others, it's eco-purgatory. Science writer Hannah Holmes spent a year appraising the lawn through the eyes of the squirrels, crows, worms, and spiders who think of her backyard as their own. "Suburban Safari" is" "a fascinating and often hilarious record of her discoveries: that many animals adore the suburban environment, including bears and cougars venturing in from the woods; how plants, in their struggle for dominance, communicate with their own kind and battle other species; and that ways already exist for us to grow healthier, livelier lawns.

"With an elegant and earnest writing style more common among nature writers than academics, McKee tallies the value of a balanced ecosystem." --Nation "McKee is bringing to Sparing Nature the same graceful writing style combined with insights of a fine scientist that I found in The Riddled Chain. Furthermore, his timing is exquisite, since the close relationship of human population growth to the decay of biodiversity has not been brought to popular audiences in far too long." --Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University Are humans too good at adapting to the earth's natural environment? Every day, there is a net gain of 200,000 people on the planet--that's 146 a minute. Has our explosive population growth led to the mass extinction of countless species in the earth's plant and animal communities? Jeffrey K. McKee contends it has. Exploring the cause-and-effect relationship between these two trends, McKee demonstrates that nature is too sparing to accommodate both a richly diverse living world and a rapidlly expanding number of people. He probes the past to find that humans and their ancestors have had negative impacts on species biodiversity for nearly two million years, and that extinction rates have accelarated since the origins of agriculture. Today entire ecosystems are in peril due to the relentless growth of the human population. Providing a guided tour of the interconnections within the living world, Sparing Nature makes the maze of technical research and scientific debates accessible to the general reader. McKee not only encourages more responsible reproductive habits, but also takes an objective look at the means that might be employed to decrease fertility rates and stop the population explosion. Jeffrey K. McKee is a professor in the department of anthropology as well as the department of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at The Ohio State University.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aAgyemanas advocacy for just sustainability effectively addresses the equity deficit of mainstream sustainability. In his conclusion, he suggests a number of strategies that could be of use to those of us in the design community. One of these is the concept of an aenvironmental space, a built on the idea of a sustainable community place. In this matrix, not only are traditional environmental resources considered but also included in the equation are social and economic entitlements. Environmental space analysis is exactly the kind of hybrid problem that design professionals commonly work with. This creative reframing of urban space and social justice issues is a strategy that might well be duplicated in rethinking our course projects and other scholarly pursuits.a
--"Journal of Architectural Education"

aA lively and thought-provoking text, with informative case study examples, which allows the reader plenty of opportunity to follow Agyemanas reasoning and analysis.a
--"Journal of the American Planning Association"

"Covering both theory and practive, environmental organizations are indexed according to their commitment to justice and/or sustainability principles as set forth in their mission statements. Examples illustrating broad issue categories of successful projects that exemplify "just sustainability" enhance the discussion."
--"Choice," recommended

aJulian Agyeman once again pushes us all to think more critically about how to integrate two important political and intellectual projects. This book is at the cutting edge of research on sustainability and environmental justice. Agyeman has set the standard forthe next generation of studies on these critical challenges.a
--David Naguib Pellow, co-author of "The Silicon Valley of Dreams"

"Worth the effort."
--"In Brief"

"Julian Agyeman has provided a theoretical and empirical foundation for making environmental justice a central focus of sustainability. He lucidly demonstrates both the rationale and the agenda for a 'just sustainability' that is not 'just' about environmental sustainability. In mapping this new territory, Agyeman has made an important contribution to scholarship that will also be valued by practitioners."
--Mark Roseland, author of "Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments"

Popularized in the movies "Erin Brockovich" and "A Civil Action," aenvironmental justicea refers to any local response to a threat against community health. In this book, Julian Agyeman argues that environmental justice and the sustainable communities movement are compatible in practical ways. Yet sustainability, which focuses on meeting our needs today while not compromising the ability of our successors to meet their needs, has not always partnered with the challenges of environmental justice.

Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice explores the ideological differences between these two groups and shows how they can work together. Agyeman provides concrete examples of potential model organizations that employ the types of strategies he advocates. This book is vital to the efforts of community organizers, policymakers, and everyone interested in a better environment and community health.

Colonized as early as 13,500 years ago, the Northern Channel Islands of California offer some of the earliest evidence of human habitation along the west coast of North America. The Chumash people who lived on these islands are considered to be among the most socially and politically complex hunter-gatherers in the world. This book provides a powerful and innovative synthesis of the cultural and environmental history of the chain of islands. Douglas J. Kennett shows that the trends in cultural elaboration were, in part, set into motion by a series of dramatic environmental events that were the catalyst for the unprecedented social and political complexity observed historically.

Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina's Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gaston R. Gordillo reveals how the Toba's memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of "the bush" that dominates the Chaco landscape. As Gordillo explains, the bush is the result of social, cultural, and political processes that intertwine this place with other geographies. Labor exploitation, state violence, encroachment by settlers, and the demands of Anglican missionaries all transformed this land. The Toba's lives have been torn between alienating work in sugar plantations and relative freedom in the bush, between moments of domination and autonomy, abundance and poverty, terror and healing. Part of this contradictory experience is culturally expressed in devils, evil spirits that acquire different features in different places. The devils are sources of death and disease in the plantations, but in the bush they are entities that connect with humans as providers of bush food and healing power. Enacted through memory, the experiences of the Toba have produced a tense and shifting geography. Combining extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, historical research, and critical theory, Gordillo offers a nuanced analysis of the Toba's social memory and a powerful argument that geographic places are not only objective entities but also the subjective outcome of historical forces.

Winner of the Charles H. Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Richard G. Mitchell Jr. spent more than a dozen years among survivalists at public conferences, private meetings, and clandestine training camps across America. He takes us inside a compelling, hidden world more connected to the chaos of modern life many of us experience than the label separatist suggests. In survivalism Mitchell found a profound and meaningful critique of contemporary industrial society, a subculture in which the real evil is not repressive government but the far more insidious influence of a Planet Microsoft mentality with its abundance of empty choices. Survivalists, Mitchell shows us, are seeking resistance, not struggling against it; they are looking for ways to define themselves and test their talents in a society that is becoming devitalized and formless.

This guide enables students of human geography to take a critical look at the set of practices, hardware and software that are together described as GIS.
A guide to GIS for students of human geography.
Outlines the distinct approaches to inquiry employed in GIS and illustrates their relevance for human geographers.
Traces the history of GIS and human geography from 1970 to the present.
Illustrates the challenges of data collection, classification in the context of multiple stakeholders and epistemological approaches.
Tracks the use of GIS in applied contexts through the stages of problem definition, data acquisition and classification, choice of software, spatial analysis and graphic output.
Includes an inventory of tools and information related to GIS, including web-based resources.
Supported by a website, www.blackwellpublishing.com/schuurman.

Great Lakes Journey is a follow-up to William Ashworth's earlier book ""The Late, Great Lakes"", published in 1986. Fifteen years after his first trip, Ashworth journeys to many of the same places and talks to many of the same people to examine the changes that have taken place along the Great Lakes since the 1980s. It is a poetic account of his 6000-mile trip, mixed with explanations of the scientific and poilitical realities behind the observed changes, reminiscences of his 1983 trip, and conversations with local residents - some of them scientists, and other simply people who care. Through personal observations, research and numerous interviews with scientists, activists and government agencies, Ashworth creates a detailed picture of the status of the Great Lakes at the end of the 20th century. Among the most prominent changes he finds are the arrival of the zebra mussel and other exotic species, the rise and fall of the RAP process for pollution cleanup, a growing public mistrust of government action, a substantial loss of habitat and biodiversity, and an explosion of urban sprawl along the shores of the Lakes. Scholars and students of environmental studies and ecology and readers interested in the health of the Great Lakes should find this fresh look at one of America's endangered regions of value.

What does it mean to "dwell"? Every civilization has a story to tell, according to Anne Buttimer, and exploring those stories brings fresh light to modern ideas about the relationship between humanity and its environment. In "Geography and the Human Spirit," Buttimer ranges widely from Plato to Barry Lopez, from the "Upanishads" to Goethe, taking an interdisciplinary look at the ways in which human beings have turned to natural science, theology, and myth to form visions of the earth as a human habitat.

Nowhere on Earth is the challenge for ecological understanding greater, and yet more urgent, than in those parts of the globe where human activity is most intense - cities. People need to understand how cities work as ecological systems so they can take control of the vital links between human actions and environmental quality, and work for an ecologically and economically sustainable future. An ecosystem approach integrates biological, physical and social factors and embraces historical and geographical dimensions, providing our best hope for coping with the complexity of cities. This book is the first of its kind to bring together leaders in the biological, physical and social dimensions of urban ecosystem research with leading education researchers, administrators and practitioners, to show how an understanding of urban ecosystems is vital for urban dwellers to grasp the fundamentals of ecological and environmental science, and to understand their own environment.

Half of all known languages have disappeared in the last five hundred years and 90% of all languages are in danger of becoming extinct during the next century. The loss of both linguistic and biological diversity is part of a much larger and more serious problem - the near-total collapse of our worldwide ecosystem. Romaine and Nettle describe the background of this situation, how the current catastrophe occurred, and what can be done about it.

For readers of A Civil Action and Refuge, a harrowing story of a body and a place--the New Jersey boglands, one of the most contaminated regions of the country. This is an American story. Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation. Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This beautifully composed book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream."[An] arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the twentieth century's most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chloradane, benzene, and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape...Antonetta's considerable achievement in Body Toxic is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places...What Antonetta has written is something new--a postpsychological memoir...By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative. " Michael Pollan, New York Times Book Review"Bittersweet and spiked with startlingly poetic descriptions...[It] opens a new chapter in the literature of place and offers a fresh and poignant look at the old story of inheritance."Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

..". an important contribution to environmental philosophy.... includes provocative discussions of institutional and systemic violence, indigenous resistance to development, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, women s ecological knowledge, Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Berry s ideas about principled engagement in community, wilderness advocacy, and the need for an attachment to place." Choice

" T]his is a very important book, raising serious questions for development theorists and environmentalists alike." Boston Book Review

When Indian centenarian Chinnagounder asked Deane Curtin about his interest in traditional medicine, especially since he wasn t working for a drug company looking to patent a new discovery, Curtin wondered whether it was possible for the industrialized world to interact with native cultures for reasons other than to exploit them, develop them, and eradicate their traditional practices. The answer, according to Curtin, defines the ethical character of what we typically call 'progress.' Despite the familiar assertion that we live in a global village, cross-cultural environmental and social conflicts are often marked by failures of communication due to deeply divergent assumptions. Curtin articulates a response to Chinnagounder s challenge in terms of a new, distinctly postcolonial, environmental ethic."

They came from around the world: from parliaments, senates, and assemblies; from temples, churches, and mosques; from laboratories, universities, and boardrooms. It was the first time that spiritual and parliamentary leaders had come together with scientific experts to confront the threats of environmental crisis, nuclear war, famine, and disease. After five days of dialogue and contemplation the participants pledged to join forces to care for and protect the Earth with all its interdependent forms of life. This unprecedented meeting--the Global Survival Conference held at Oxford in April 1988--is re-created here in a compelling eyewitness account that offers hope for the future of our planet.

Can sociology help us to tackle environmental problems? What can sociology tell us about the nature of the environment and about the origins and consequences of environmental risks, hazards and change? In this important new book Alan Irwin maps out this emerging field of knowledge, teaching and research. He reviews the key sociological debates in the field and sets out a new framework for analysis and practice.
Among the themes examined are constructivism and realism, sustainable development and theories of the risk society. Readers are also introduced to communities at risk, institutional regulation and the environmental consequences of technology. Particular topics for discussion include genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, pesticide safety and the local hazards of the chemical industry. Rather than maintaining a fixed boundary between nature and society, Irwin highlights the hybrid character of environmental issues and emphasizes the role of social and cultural factors within environmental policy.
Combining theoretical discussion and case-studies with a sensitivity to the concerns of environmental policy and practice, Sociology and the Environment provides an excellent introduction to an expanding and immensely important field. It will be a valuable text for students and scholars in sociology, geography, environmental studies and related disciplines.

Human settlement of the Lower Mississippi River Valley--especially in New Orleans, the region's largest metropolis--has produced profound and dramatic environmental change. From prehistoric midden building to late-twentieth century industrial pollution, "Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs" traces through history the impact of human activity upon the environment of this fascinating and unpredictable region.

In eleven essays, scholars across disciplines--including anthropology, architecture, history, natural history, and geography--chronicle how societies have worked to transform untamed wetlands and volatile floodplains into a present-day sprawling urban center and industrial complex, and how they have responded to the environmental changes brought about by the disruption of the natural setting.

This new text follows the trials of native and colonial settlers as they struggled to shape the environment to fit the needs of urbanization. It demonstrates how the Mississippi River, while providing great avenues for commerce, transportation, and colonization also presented the region's greatest threat to urban centers, and details how engineers set about taming the mighty river. Also featured is an analysis of the impact of modern New Orleans upon the surrounding rural parishes and the effect urban pollution has had on the city's water supply and aquatic life.